
Well I didn’t quite forget to write the blog… But I am writing it on the morning it gets published! After opening the door to trick or treaters every couple of minutes last night it may have escaped my mind!
Over the last month and going forward for the next few days we’ve been getting our bees ready for winter. Any hives that hadn’t produced enough to get themselves through winter have been fed syrup to bulk them up ready for the long winter. It’s due to cool off now over the coming week or two and that means the end of syrup feeding as it becomes too cold for the bees to consume it, that means one of the final beekeeping jobs of the year is nearly upon us. Over the next week we will be going around removing the feeders and adding something called a mouse guard, a metal plate with holes that the bees can get through but that stops mice getting in. We will also tidy up our apiaries removing any empty hives and changing over any damaged lids that might let water in. Once that’s done we won’t be doing much with them until January time.
One thing we’ve been very happy about this autumn is the lack of wasps, normally they cause our bees some real problems because they fight their way in to the hives to eat the honey the bees have collected. This year however they just haven’t really got going which has been brilliant for our bees!
Over the winter we are busy jarring honey, over the past 18 months our business has changed quite a bit and we are now jarring honey for a large number of other brands which keeps us very busy. I think since January we have filled about 200,000 jars!!! A long way from my first 9 jars done in the kitchen when I started 7 years ago! We help these other brands with all things honey, from finding specific ones from other British bee farmers to helping with label design and printing. We all still enjoy getting suited up and checking on our bees though!

Sorry this month is only a short update, we’ve got some expansion plans over the coming months so hopefully we can update you all with that in December and January.
Thank you very much for reading our blog and supporting our small business
Matthew Ingram